The last of the leaves, even in Boston, had changed color, and many had fallen to the ground, a temptation on a sunny, mild November afternoon. Carine remembered raking huge piles of leaves as a kid with her brother and sister-and Tyler North-and diving into them, hiding, wrestling.

Ty almost suffocated her once. Unfortunately, she hadn't thought of it as a premonition. It was just Ty being Ty, pushing the limits.

But the nine months since their canceled wedding had taught her not to dwell on thoughts of her one-time fiancé and what might have been. She dashed across busy Arlington Street to a French café, splurging on a latte that she took back outside with her. Of course, it was true that she could be photographing wild turkeys in Cold Ridge-or red-tailed hawks, mountain sunsets, waterfalls, rock formations, alpine grasses. She was still a nature photographer, never mind that she'd been in Boston for six months and had just accepted a long-term assignment photographing house renovations.

Not just any house renovations, she thought. Sterling and Jodie Rancourt had hired her to photograph the painstaking restoration and renovation of their historic Victorian mansion on Commonwealth Avenue.

Carine sighed, sipping her latte as she peered in the display windows of the upscale shops and salons on trendy Newbury Street. But Ty kept creeping into her thoughts. Even when she'd chased him with a rake at six, spitting bits of leaves out of her mouth, she'd known not to get involved with him, ever. The six-year-old inside her, who knew better than to trust anything he said, must have been screaming bloody murder when she'd fallen in love with him last winter.

The man could jump out of a helicopter to rescue a downed aircrew-it didn't matter where. Behind enemy lines, on a mountaintop, in a desert or a jungle or an ocean, in snow or heat or rain. In combat or peacetime.